Nigerians Can’t Endure More Punishments Through Hike In Fuel, Electricity Prices, NLC Tells Buhari Government
The Nigerian Labour Congress on Saturday called on the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to halt all its policies negatively affecting the living standards of people in the country in 2022.
The labour union said it would resist every attempt to inflict more pain on citizens.
The NLC also warned state governors starving pensioners and workers with their entitlement and the new minimum wage respectively to desist from forcing them into more poverty.
President of the NLC, Ayuba Wabba, in his 2022 message to Nigerians said, “Our argument has been that there is a limit to the imposition of hardship and suffering on the fragile shoulders of the Nigerian people.
“It is gratifying that amidst the deteriorating conditions of living, organised Labour was able to rise up to ensure that the masses of our people were not completely run over by market forces enabled by the anti-people policies of the government and at the whims of shylock capitalists.
“Still, the government is not relenting in its determination to push through further increases in the pump price of petrol and which as usual had been dubbed as ‘removal of petrol subsidy’.
“Well, organised labour has made its position clear on this matter.
“We have told the government in very clear terms that Nigerians have suffered enough and will not endure more punishment by way of further petrol and electricity price increases.”
The labour leader stressed that the socio-economic pains inflicted by the unprecedented lockdown in 2020 continued to manifest throughout 2021, adding that the evident trails of the huge dislocation could be easily identified in the escalation and hyper-inflation of basic goods and services.
He said since Nigerians were exposed to the most turbulent and unpredictable market realities in the just concluded year, labour would reject any further increase by all means.
”The truth is that the perennial increase by the government of the pump price of petrol is actually a transfer of government failure and inability to effectively govern to the poor masses of our country.
”We are talking of the failure of government to manage Nigeria’s four oil refineries and inability to build new ones more than thirty years after the last petrochemical refinery in Port Harcourt was commissioned; the failure to rein in smuggling; and the failure to determine empirically the quantity of petrol consumed in Nigeria.
”The shame takes a gory dimension with the fact that Nigeria is the only OPEC country that cannot refine her own crude oil,” the labour leader said.
The Nigerian Government plans to remove petrol subsidy in 2022 in order to save more for infrastructure development.
Consequently, pump price of petrol could jump from N163 to N340 per litre.
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SaharaReporters, New York
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